destructive
by sort of abandoned
Summary: "I'm the image of deception." / A little two-shot piece about Grenda and her horrifying path to self destruction. Contains mentions of an eating disorder and teenage suicide.
1. Chapter 1

She knows that she is not the proper weight, the weight that she meant to be. Her incessant nuisance of a mother will always keep on comparing her to the other seemingly perfect children, as if Grenda herself is not at all suitable. Her mother does not factor how she cannot stop herself, yet it is not a problem that can be solved by running on the track or starting on crash diets: now, that would not do.

Her daughter stops thinking when she eats. Grenda cannot control it though, as it is not her fault, as she only focuses on the delicious taste, the sweet foods on her taste buds, reminding her of how much she is a greedy pig. Perhaps, at the beginning, it was not too bad; she had been underweight, and didn't gain too much, staying at a norm, an average point. Sooner or later, tragedy struck, and perhaps the worst part wasn't having people point it out, but knowing that daily, she would always hate herself.

_Her friends leave her soon after._

She believes that she will now begin her recovery, in a way most simple, though it could be known as the most destructive, as well.

Perhaps this name of it, purging, might have been wrong if one was speaking about the years to come, but the pounds she'd made up for the pain, the dizzying side effects. Every time she eats, it as if the food is plaguing her body, like a tumour, like a poison, and the only way to rid herself of that poison, of that tumour is to regain control. People like her, people with these weights, do not have control, as food has gotten the better of them.

Taking small steps is the way to go, but heed that those steps stay small; perhaps if somebody noticed, she would not have doubled the doses of her laxatives. This was not the control, not the things, not the life that Grenda had wanted. Her mother decides to put her on an exercise regimen soon after, encouraging her to be more like her best friends such as Candy, who strives for perfection in intelligence; they all have their strengths, whether it would be Mabel in knitting, or Pacifica in singing, and really just Pacifica being generally attractive. It was all stuck together like peanut butter and jelly toast.

However, Grenda soon begins to exercise, in any, every single possible way that she can. Eventually, she finds her mind only belonging to exercise, the obsession reaching a level so high that she'll never stop.

It seems as though she should be losing the weight, shedding it off, but every moment Grenda spends looking down at herself, she believes that her weight is only increasing, becoming consumed with weight and only weight, teetering, never able to stay still, to have control in order to not fall off the delicate balances that she has set up for herself.

In the end, she has lost weight.

She had rejoined the popular committee along with egotistical leader Pacifica, who had previously "fired" her for excessive weight, and loss of control, and they ask her how she's lost so much weight, but she just smiles slyly, laughing like her little secret never happened.

_It's easier that way._

However, now she has to deal with the side effects; apparently, it is not enough that smelling atrociously, eating like a pig, and the strange looks received are also side effects. Everybody used to comment on her hair, but now it's falling out; she takes a shower, and globs of it come out with her fingers, and she sees it all over the wall.

She keeps on purging and binging, though.

It's the only way to stay in the popular gang, to maintain that level of essential popularity, popularity essential for living. It's not the end, however; her body starts acting strange, her heart is beating erratically, and she feels faint all of a sudden: she cannot eat laxatives, and every time she pukes, more and more blood spills.

She is finally gone from the world, but not dead yet, not for some time, at least.

Dry skin, blotches on her face, puffy cheeks, and a sore throat; cuts on her fingers, raw knuckles, a horrible face, but there really is no way out of this mess, except death; Grenda is killing herself for the sake of a cheeseburger, but she does not care. The food is more important than anything, and puking is just a part of the food; perhaps she quits every time.

Grenda does do that — quitting all the time. She had her face buried in the toilet earlier, but she's just quitting again, that's a nicer term. Quitting so fast that the fries she threw away are calling to her; she wishes they would just be silenced once and for all.

_Now, her funeral is the next day._


	2. Chapter 2

Sometimes, Grenda wishes life had an escape button — she wishes she could be be Alice and loose herself in a world of walking cards, cheshire cats, mad hatters and magic.

Life, she thinks, is an illusion, where one moment she's soaring through utopia and the next, she's huddled up in bed, crying and crying and crying until she's too sore, too numb to even feel. There are those instances, those picturesque moments when everything seems plausible and possible, yet most of the time, those moments are overshadowed by the days everything is wrong, and hopelessness seizes her.

It's not as easy as she tries to make it seem, being Grenda.

There are so many days when she feels as if she's on the brink of crumbling and yet, she's forced to put on a pretty smile, because showing emotion is a sign of weakness and she must keep up her facade, for Marius' sake, for the sake of the family reputation she must uphold. She's already shamed her family enough, just by being herself and she doesn't want to mess up even more.

She's trying her hardest but it doesn't seem to be working anymore.

More than anything, Grenda hates looking in the mirror, seeing all her imperfection and her flaws reflected back at her — thrown in her face — and sometimes she wishes she could crash herself into the glass, watch her reflection shatter into a million little pieces, and sometimes she wishes she could curl up in a ball and drown herself in self-loathing.

She's always the odd one out, the second choice, the one that doesn't really seem to fit in amongst all those pretty faces with their perfect everything. Looking at her friends, she feels self-conscious because Mabel &amp; Pacifica have made thousands of boys drool, with their glamorous smiles and exotic beauty that Grenda never really got.

She sees it in her mother's eyes and in the looks exchanged between her friends —

There's no more sugar coating facts, Grenda is a fat, ugly pig and that's that.

She tries dieting, then she tries fasting, but it's all hopeless because days have gone by, and the hunger is almost killing her now but she looks in the mirror and it's all the same, always the same.

Some days, Grenda reads books about fairytales, about little girls who grow up to become lovely swans &amp; marry the man of their dreams, and wishes she was special.

She doesn't have charm, she doesn't have beauty — all she has is burps and funny jokes that scare boys away and Grenda was never meant to be born amongst all these princesses and princes — she's a lowly peasant with nothing she can claim to be hers. She's losing everything; her friends don't care anymore (did they ever?) and her mother looks at her with the same pity and disgust that makes Grenda want to run, run, run away from everything and anything.

She wants to scream until her voice goes hoarse but Grenda doesn't dare to utter a word because she doesn't want to be labeled again; fat, ugly, slut, useless, attention whore… the list is irrevocably endless and so is the amount of times Grenda has cried because of it.

They'll never understand what it's like to feel the world falling apart beneath your feet, to watch your hopes, dreams and wishes all go down the drain.

She's stopped eating again, just to see if maybe the fourth time's the charm.

Sometimes, Grenda looks back at wonders what happened to the little girl, with two, tiny auburn braids and a huge smile, skipping through the first few years of life weightlessly — no regrets, no hesitations, nothing whatsoever. The girl that used to take two chocolate chip cookies and a peanut butter jelly sandwich in a pink Several Times bag to lunch everyday and not care about the consequences of sugar, calories, butter and all those other things Grenda frets about now.

She wants to be that little girl again.

Grenda sees the escape button now — it's in the form of tiny red pills and a crystal bottle but it's there nonetheless.

It's an easy route, it's fast and it's efficient, it's one quick swallow and then it's over, all gone. Grenda looks but she does not see something forbidden and she doesn't see a dead end — she sees a beginning, a light shining on the far edge of the tunnel. She can close her eyes and picture it all now, a tiny island located up in the clouds, filled with endless possibilities — it's all just a daydream away.

Maybe she's crazy — and maybe she's seeing things but Grenda knows, she feels her heart and she knows.

She closes her eyes and lets go, for once and for all.


End file.
